Fleet Management

Uber Freight Now Renting Trailers to its Carriers

Powerloop is a new Uber Freight company that aims to make "power-only loads more accessible to carriers" by renting them trailers.

Photo: Uber Freight/Powerloop

Having determined that what it terms the “traditional trailer pool model” to be “particularly ripe for reinvention,” Uber Freight has launched Powerloop.

The “brand new company,” which was announced on Oct. 17 and is described as affiliated with Uber Freight, will rent trailers to eligible Uber Freight motor carriers and “in doing so, enable them to participate in an innovative new trailer pool model,” said the company.

In a blog post, Max Pike, Uber Freight’s program manager of strategic projects, explained that Powerloop aims to lower the barrier to entry to trailer-pool programs. “Eligible carriers leveraging the Powerloop program are able to find backhauls more frequently and spend more of their day moving through the network instead of constantly searching for the next load,” he pointed out.

As for shippers, Pike explained they will be “able to take advantage of the ecosystem of readily available Uber Freight carriers, made even more agile by the Powerloop trailer pool. This helps them streamline facility operations by loading and unloading trailers when most convenient. It’s a win-win and a big step forward for the industry.”

At the moment, Powerloop trailer rentals are available in parts of Texas, where they are being used by “a handful of Fortune 500 shipper partners, like Anheuser-Busch, and a network of entrepreneurial carriers, some of which have already moved their entire operations to power-only and grown their fleets as a result,” Pike stated in his post.

Over time, Powerloop plans to scale the program and help create a single, interconnected trailer-pool system, in which “shippers of all sizes can turn drop operations on and off when they need to, and any eligible carrier can move a trailer, anywhere in the country,” according to Pike.

“It’s still early days for the program,” he added, “but we’re excited by the promise of Powerloop and the far-reaching benefits of making power-only loads more accessible to carriers.”

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